Ad Blankestijn: Mariana by Millais (1851)

The painting depicts a woman in a long dark blue dress, rising from the embroidery on a worktable in front of her to stretch her back. Tired, she supports her lower back with her hands and leans back as she stretches, resulting in an unconsciously sensual posture. Her face is pale and her eyes are closed. Her red upholstered stool and desk are placed in front of a Gothic stained-glass window looking out onto a garden, the leaves of which are changing from green to autumnal brown. Some leaves have drifted into the room and fallen on the embroidery, and more on the bare wooden floorboards (where we also see a small mouse). In the background, a small triptych, a silver casket, and candles have been placed as a devotional altar on a white cloth-covered piece of furniture next to the curtain of a bed. The interior is richly decorated.

[Mariana by John Everett Millais]

What are we seeing?

Mariana, by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, is a small oil-on-panel painting (59.7 x 49.5 cm). In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure Mariana was a woman about to be married, but rejected by her fiancé, Angelo, when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. She retreated to a solitary existence in a moated house. Five years later, Angelo was tricked into consummating their betrothal. Tennyson retold the story in his 1830 poem "Mariana" and returned to it in his 1832 poem "Mariana in the South". He described how Mariana, tormented by longing for her former lover, sought solace in devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Like many other Pre-Raphaelites, Millais was inspired by English Romantic literature, especially Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson. When he first exhibited his Mariana at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1851, he included the last stanza of Tennyson's poem:

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound,
Which to the whooping wind aloft
The poplar made, did all the confounding
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moved sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then she said, "I am very afraid,
He will not come", she said;
She whimpers, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I was dead!"

Like Tennyson in his poem, Millais attempts to capture Mariana's inner turmoil - the tension between her physical desires and her intense sadness is expressed in her posture. She wearily supports her lower back with her hands. Her unconsciously sensual posture suggests her unsatisfied sexual desire. At the same time she radiates a certain lethargy that underscores her despair and frustration.

Characteristic of Millais's Pre-Raphaelite style is his use of bold, contrasting colors and his hyper-realistic attention to detail, full of medieval symbolism. The snowdrop in the heraldic window reflects Mariana's virginity. The autumn leaves indicate the passage of time and the transience of beauty. The stained glass windows are based on those in Merton College Chapel in Oxford and represent the Annunciation. Mariana's devotion, but also her boredom, is strongly symbolized by the embroidery she is working on, which is almost finished. The needle has just been inserted, suggesting that the work has been interrupted with a certain abruptness.

Millais's painting differs from Tennyson's narrative in the following: Millais's Mariana is placed in a scene filled with vibrant colors; she is not the forlorn woman described by Tennyson, unwilling to live an independent life, confined to a dilapidated retreat.

The painting has been in the Tate Britain in London since 1999. It was previously in the private collection of the British diplomat and Baron Roger Makins.

John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896) was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the most successful painters of Victorian Britain. He was descended from an old Jersey family. In 1840, at the age of eleven, Millais was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, becoming the youngest student ever to attend that school. There he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. With them he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

Important works from this period include Christ in the House of His Parents from 1850, which was criticized for depicting the Holy Family as hard-working people in poor conditions. Millais took the criticism to heart and would henceforth choose less controversial subjects. He received more praise for his Ophelia of 1852, inspired by the character of the same name in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, with Elizabeth Siddal as the model.

[Ophelia (1852) - The painting depicts Ophelia floating in a river just before she drowns. Ophelia's pose - her open arms and upwards gaze - resembles traditional portrayals of saints or martyrs, but has also been interpreted as erotic. The "vulnerable woman" was a popular subject among Pre-Raphaelite artists. Millais had his model, Elizabeth Siddall, lie fully clothed in a bathtub in his studio. As it was winter, and the water gradually become colder, she caught a severe cold. The lush vegetation was painted by Millais on an outside location, along the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey.]

The Pre-Raphaelites had an important supporter in the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). Millais thus came into contact with Ruskin's wife, Effie Gray, who was unhappy with her husband. This led to an affair between Millais and Effie in 1853. The next year, Effie left her husband and the marriage was annulled. In 1855, Millais and Effie married. They had eight children.

Millais' career was very successful socially. In 1853, he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. Millais exhibited at the Great Exhibitions in London and Paris, received the Légion d'honneur (1878), an honorary doctorate from Oxford (1880), and in 1885 became the first British artist to be created a baronet. In 1896, Millais succeeded Frederic Leighton as president of the Royal Academy, but he died a few months later. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.

[Incorporates some translated and edited texts from the English and Dutch Wikipedia articles on this subject]